Funny sort of morning, really

Woken 6am by nagging gripe in my stomach or thereabouts. The ipod came up trumps: Stephen Fry reading Paddington Bear. Don't you love that man?

Found myself designing an ideal 'if you have to be really ill' scenario, then how would you like it to be. I'd like the world's best pain management that allows me to be as I am now: travelling, playing, enjoying the world. But surgery and chemotherapy would wipe me out flat at a stroke - would they really win me much time? Can't I do without?

Life just packed, squeezed, full of remarkable serendipitous coincidence: on Monday at the Homoeopathic Hospital, crossed paths with the only woman I've met this year with secondary breast cancer, last seen at that wonderful Writing Workshop. And she was in such glowing good form; gave me details of an Outward Bound-style holiday for people in our boat. If you can walk a mile, they'll take you on. I think I can - but not if I start all that bloody treatment. She'd even had a recent CT scan which showed her bone tumours shrinking - and yet she'd had no chemo. What's that about?

Dear Homoeopathic Hospital, funding forever under threat. It really isn't nonsense, for anyone who ever questioned the value of little sugary pills. The 'calm down, dear' drops they gave me really, really helped on Tuesday, when the scan people had lost my records & briefly suggested the easiest option would be to come back another day: oh no you don't, mate.

Time for a little yoga, the gentlest of sequences dearest A gave me in Colorado. And then the wonderful Tony the Plumber is due: practical improvements needed to the bathroom, please, and pronto if you can.